However, individual objects in each portrait were actually overlapped together to make various anatomical shapes of a human. 1573.Īrcimboldo’s conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, plants, fruits, sea creatures, and tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today.Īt a distance, his portraits looked like normal human portraits.
He was a conventional court painter of portraits for three Holy Roman Emperors in Vienna and Prague, also producing religious subjects and, among other things, a series of coloured drawings of exotic animals in the imperial menagerie. These works form a distinct category from his other productions. Giuseppe Arcimboldo was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books – that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognizable likeness of the portrait subject. These are some of the startling details in the composite paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1593) that are made up of disparate but related elements. 1590.Ī cucumber forms a bulbous nose the open maul of a wolf simulates an eye a striking iron is an ear a shark is a mouth a pile of books composes a torso. “Vertumnus – Rudolf II,” depicts Rudolph II (1552-1612), Holy Roman Emperor from 1576, as Vertumnus, the ancient Roman god of seasons who presided over gardens and orchards.